


Sticks + Stones

by JustAnotherWriter (N1ghtshade)



Series: Wunderkind 0.5 [5]
Category: MacGyver (TV 2016)
Genre: Angst, Found Family, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Past Child Abuse, Pre-series Wunderkind
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-09
Updated: 2020-12-09
Packaged: 2021-03-10 07:40:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27966956
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/N1ghtshade/pseuds/JustAnotherWriter
Summary: A good undercover operative will let themselves sink into real emotions to make their cover feel real. The best ones know that that's a one way ticket to disaster. A good seventy percent of undercover agents end up with broken marriages and destroyed partnerships because the lines get blurred. Jack knows how to draw them. Sarah knew it too.He can't be sure Riley does.An undercover op hits a little too close to home for Riley, and she and Jack have to face the consequences.
Relationships: Jack Dalton (MacGyver TV 2016) & Riley Davis
Series: Wunderkind 0.5 [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1947766
Comments: 10
Kudos: 21





	Sticks + Stones

**Author's Note:**

> Apparently the muses say I will write about Riley or write nothing at all, so here's some more! 
> 
> There's something about the elevator scene of 111 in canon that's rubbed me the wrong way since I saw it (besides my issues with the way canon handled Jack and Riley's pre-series situation) and it finally hit me (pun intended) that Riley resorting to a physically violent action out of anger should have shaken her a lot more than it apparently did, given her past with Elwood. And it also ended up taking a slight spin on another Jack and Riley moment I wasn't happy with in canon, the situation at the warehouse in 202...

Of all the things Jack has had to convince people to do, over the years, finding it this hard to get his partner to slap him in the face is not one he expected to be so difficult.

He and Sarah played marriage/partnership/affair on the rocks so many times he thinks there's probably a permanent impression of her fingers in his cheek. They were very, very good at making it look like things were over for good. Like one of them was in the wind, hurting and looking to make the other person pay. They were so good at it that Matty made sure they got tapped for those kind of undercovers whenever possible.

He'd expected that it would be even easier to convince his sometimes surly, always brash, barely-out-of-her-teens current partner to do the same. She has authority issues the size of Mount Everest and no problem showing them. Which he takes a sort of strange pride in, clearly she knows he won't punish her for mouthing off or report it and send her up the chain.

"Look, baby girl. We gotta sell it. These guys have to think you'll hack my files and steal top-secret plans out of sheer spite."

"And I can do that. I don't need to get physical." Riley isn't looking him in the eyes. She's playing with the loose string on the edge of her crop top.

"You're not gonna hurt me, Riles. It's just a little fake slap. You've given me bigger bruises in self-defense training."

Somehow, that doesn't seem to reassure her in the least.

“Seriously. Riles. I promise, it’s okay.” Jack says. “Well, it will be if you take off all those rings you got on.” 

He meant it mostly as a joke, although he learned fast that the worst slaps were the times he and Sarah were posing as married and she was wearing more than a plain gold band. One time she’d fidgeted with it so much the stones worked their way around her finger and actually drew blood. She’d been so apologetic afterward it was almost more painful than the alcohol wipe she was using to clean the damage.

Riley starts yanking her rings off so fast it’s like someone heated the metal up. She drops them on the console of the car between her and Jack with a clatter, then sweeps them into one hand and shoves them into a pocket. Her fingers are trembling.

“Just think about it like they taught you to do if you have to maintain cover when a fellow agent is outed or captured.” Jack admittedly is not a fan of how far that training can go, but it also can mitigate some of the shock of experiencing that in the field for the first time. Whichever side of it you’re on. 

Riley doesn’t respond. She just glances out the car window at the restaurant Jack is parking in front of. They’ve confirmed Jenkins and Henderson have reservations here tonight. And then slotted themselves in. Jack feels a little sorry for whoever ‘Galfi, party of two’ was, that Riley had to boot to insert their cover personas. Hopefully the restaurant will assume responsibility and make it up to them. Hopefully it wasn’t an anniversary dinner or something equally important to them. 

Sometimes, the way their job inconveniences regular people who don’t have a clue what’s going on really bothers him. Then again, a dirty bomb getting loose on the world in the hands of a couple of unhinged terrorists would probably be a much bigger inconvenience. 

Jack is posing as the military technician in charge of dismantling the recovered bomb and studying it. Riley is his rebellious, skating-on-the-edge-of-anarchist college dropout daughter. Who just happened to be a semester away from a degree in cybersecurity. And a skilled firewall architect can also get behind them. 

According to their prepared starter script, this dinner is ‘John Wyatt’’s attempt at getting his wayward child to reconsider her life choices. Offering to go so far as to pay for her to finish her degree (thus implying she has some pressing personal money problems), and claiming she’ll do better for herself in the business world with a formal education (giving her a chance to spout off about a broken system that favors a certain kind of person, that needs to burn). 

“Once we get out, we’re in character,” he says, leaving the radio turned up in order to cover their voices from anyone who might overhear. “Are you ready?”

Riley waits for a long moment, taking slow breaths and clenching and unclenching her now-bare fingers against her thighs. It’s already a little strange to see her without at least one ring. 

“Yeah.” 

This isn’t quite the sort of place that will kick them to the curb for Riley’s lack of formal attire, but her ratty t-shirt sporting an Emma Goldman quote and her ripped skinny jeans raise more than one eyebrow as the waiter leads them to their table. The quote, and the scripted slap, are both intentional. A demonstration that ‘Allie Wyatt’ is certainly not the kind of person opposed to a violent solution. 

When he first read through their cover IDs it worried him. Allie seemed a little too close to the real Riley to be safe. A determined, idealistic challenger of the status quo. The closer a cover is to the real person living it, the more dangerous the mission becomes. 

The tacked-on proclivity for hands-on action isn’t her style, though. Jack knows Riley came into the agency planning to digitally burn it to the ground. Allie Wyatt, on the other hand, prefers much more literal fires. Riley can delete a person from digital existence in a few keystrokes. Allie isn’t above advocating for removing them from a very real and physical existence as well. 

Jack hopes that’s enough of a difference to keep Riley in her head and not her heart. 

By the time their drinks arrive, they’ve made their way through the prepared portions of the script and reached the improv point. Riley has moved through the transition with ease, possibly because she kept replacing scripted lines with her own sharp wit when the opportunity arose. Jack knows she’ll get a reprimand for taking a chance like that with a carefully prepared setup, but he also knows that’s what any good agent learns to do. It usually takes a few more years for them to get to that point, but part of this is probably that they’re in Riley’s element, or at least what her element used to be. And she’s nothing if not good at playing the game and saying what people want to hear. 

Jack’s not dumb, whatever he pretends to be. He knows Riley hasn’t bought into the agency’s gilded facade hook-line-and-sinker. She’s accepted that not everyone there is out to get her and people like her with a targeted agenda. But Jack is sure that’s where her acceptance ends. Riley might be willing to see them as human beings. But it doesn’t mean she doesn’t still have her issues with what the agency does, and how they do it.

Jack would by lying if he said  _ he _ didn’t feel the same. Maybe about a few less things than Riley does. He’s a little more pragmatic. Still, there are more than a few things he wonders if he should keep swallowing down. 

But thinking about that won’t help him sell this cover. John Wyatt is a caricature, the straw-man figure who blindly follows orders and never questions his status as firmly on the side of law, order, and the American way. He’s the kind of stock character that it’s easy for an argument to knock down, and for the purposes of this op, that’s what’s needed. 

So he counters every one of Riley’s admittedly very sound points with stock phrases and rehashed ideals. There’s no real substance to what he’s saying, and he’s working hard to keep it that way. He could really have a genuine conversation with Riley on this topic, and he has more than once. But this is not the place. 

They’re holding their own well, and definitely have the attention of their targets now, when suddenly Jack feels the tone of the conversation shift. 

It’s nothing he could put a name to. There’s no way to describe it. It’s just the feeling that he’s developed, as a seasoned operative, for when a cover stops becoming play-acting and starts becoming something else. Something dangerous.

“Allie, please. Calm down and we can talk about this like civilized people.” It fits the way the conversation is going, but he also hopes it rings true to Riley herself, gets her to take a step back and a step out of this persona. 

“Why? So everyone in this room doesn’t know what kind of a brainwashed drone you are?” Clearly Riley doesn’t catch the subtext. “Maybe that’s what you want to be, but you don’t get to turn me into that too.” 

“I’m not trying to make you into me.”  _ On too many levels to count. _ Jack is aware he’s losing the dividing line as well, but in a few minutes that’s not going to matter.

"That’s bullshit and you know it! All you've ever done is make me into your perfect little puppet. You don't care about me, you care about what I can do for you. You're so fucking selfish!" Riley practically screams. "You don't care about Mom, you don't care about me. We're just there to do whatever the hell you want, when you want it. You don't care whose life you ruin as long as you get what you want."

"Listen, honey..." Jack has officially stopped playing his role and is legitimately trying to talk Riley down.

The slap is, as it should be, startling. He wasn’t told, for good reason, where it was going to happen. Whether Riley's been instructed to do it during the scripted dialogue or after. Making it genuinely surprising is, while a little less than pleasant, an effective tactic. 

Jack rubs his stinging jaw. It felt real. Maybe too real. 

_ A good undercover operative will let themselves sink into real emotions to make their cover feel real. The best ones know that that's a one way ticket to disaster.  _ A good seventy percent of undercover agents end up with broken marriages and destroyed partnerships because the lines get blurred. Jack knows how to draw them. Sarah knew it too.

He can't be sure Riley does.

It's entirely possible this is legitimate grievance bubbling up. Not against Jack, per se, but against the agency as a whole. He knows this kid didn't have much of a choice in her recruitment. The deck was stacked against her and it was the agency or a prison sentence. And the only reason she had a second option at all was that what she did caught Webber’s attention. Some people would say she’s lucky. Jack has been in the business too long to think it’s that simple. To think that choice was really a carrot and a stick.  _ More like a couple of sticks, except one would let her leave with a societally acceptable source of trauma. If she’s ever able to walk away at all.  _

He's not such a perfect tin soldier he can't admit this is one fucked up mess. They  _ are _ using her. They've used him too. Both of them have skills that make them valuable to someone. Both of them are paper files with asset numbers to far too many people.

But he likes to think that to a few, they're more than that. That he's more than his skill set to Webber. And that Riley is more than hers to him.

“I’m not going to sit here and listen to this.” 

Jack resists the urge to point out that by now, she’s technically standing. She turns on her heel and heads for the door, shoes thudding against the floor.

“Allie…” he calls after her, barely remembering to use the name the agency gave her a full set of documentation for. But Riley doesn’t stop.

He accepts the waiter’s disapproving glare and the unreasonably high bill (if drinks cost that much here, he’s glad Riley made sure they never made it to dinner, and he’s sure the reimbursement office will be too) and heads for the car.

Riley, as agreed, will be long gone, catching a taxi or a bus (depending on the timing of their argument) to the previously arranged rendezvous location. Then they’ll wait for Henderson and Jenkins to come calling, metaphorically speaking. Riley’s faked social media profile should be the last piece of the puzzle to win them over. 

Despite what Webber says about him, Jack doesn’t make executive decisions in the field lightly. He weighs the consequences of following or disobeying orders, and he chooses with all the knowledge and experience of his career. 

He picks up his cell phone and calls HQ.

He wishes it was Webber on the other end of the line. But she’s trying to get another of her operatives out of a Bolivian holding cell, so Jack and Riley are temporarily the responsibility of Agent Carl Grant. The guy’s a good enough handler but he doesn’t know them.

“Grant, we’re gonna have to scuttle this one.”

“No we’re not. Davis played her role perfectly.” Grant sounds like he’s trying to explain to a small child why they can’t have a piece of candy. “She’s set up perfectly for our next move, our wiretap confirmed she’s received a communication from our marks.” 

“She’s compromised. She can’t finish this.”

Jack thinks Riley might actually kill him for that. But...she is. And he is not going to let her walk into a meet with a couple of terrorists when she’s this off her game. 

He trusts Riley. What he doesn’t trust is the people pulling their puppet strings. They don’t know his girl like he does, and right now, what he knows is that Riley is hurting, for real. That she’s distracted.

At her A game she could take those guys without a second thought. But Jack already knows she’s not on it. 

He hates to do this to her. But better a pissed off and alive Riley than a dead one on a morgue slab. And he knows she won’t take herself off the board for this. 

_ And you’re a total hypocrite, Dalton, because you’ve done the same. _

Except that that’s how he knows it’s a bad idea. That, and the fading scars of twelve stitches in his back, over his left lung. He was lucky to make it out alive. Luck is not something he likes having to count on. 

“We only have one shot at this. We can’t run another con like this on them.” Grant is remaining perfectly calm and clinical and Jack wants to smack  _ him. _ The man wants to play by the book. Put the op before the operative. 

_ Hypocrite much, again? _

Jack is perfectly willing to do that when it’s himself on the line. But he’ll be damned if he lets them make Riley into him. He’s already too far gone. But her, her he can save.

“Screw this op. And you,” Jack snaps. And then hangs up.

He knows that by the time he gets to the rendezvous, Riley will have received a text from HQ informing her that it’s Jack who’s compromised, that their op is suspended pending his conduct review. 

Mouthing off to their mutual SO not only ensured that they’ll be pulled, it spared Riley the thought that maybe Jack doesn’t trust her as much as he says he does. She’ll be furious that he blew this for them. But she’ll blame him, not herself. 

And Jack can afford another reprimand for insubordination. He’s never moving up the ranks anyway. 

When he gets to their pre-arranged meeting location, Riley is sitting on the bench under the streetlight, waiting. He pulls over to the curb and rolls down his window. 

“Hey.”

She doesn’t look up. Which is both not normal and a little scary. She should be more alert. Out here, by herself, at night. “Hey.”

“You gonna get in? No need to act like we hate each other anymore.” 

“I saw.”

Riley sounds robotic. Maybe somehow she figured out what Jack did. Maybe they told her. Maybe it’s still on the record as her fault.

Maybe she really does hate him for real now. 

“I’m sorry.”

The apology barely seems to make a dent. Riley gets up and walks over and opens the car door and climbs in, moving like a zombie. She sits down beside Jack and stares out the windshield with a thousand-yard stare.

The thing about Riley, her hands are never still. They’re always moving somehow. Whether it’s the animated way she talks with her hands when she’s excited, or tapping away on her keyboard, scrolling on her phone screen, or drumming one long, perfectly polished fingernail against a table or a car window or a steering wheel.

But now her fingers are as motionless as Jack’s when he takes up a sniper perch. Her knuckles are white, and every tendon stands out in the backs of her hands. 

“You’re sorry.” It’s flat and emotionless. 

“Yeah. It’s my fault we got pulled.” He doesn’t dare pull out now. If they get into a real screaming match now, it’s best not to have that in a moving vehicle. 

“No it’s not. I said I could handle it.” Jack doesn’t know what that means. Clearly, there was a conversation he wasn’t part of. Unless she means…

“I’m sorry if it went too far.”

"Don't ask me to do that again." Riley's hands are shaking now, and her mascara is running down her cheeks in messy black lines. “It wasn’t okay.” 

“I won’t.” Jack feels like he should have already done better. Should have respected that Riley wasn’t comfortable with the way this op was planned.  _ You would have respected her if she said she couldn’t handle a cover in a strip joint, wouldn’t you? So you should have listened to what she was saying. Should have known she’s good at telling people what they want to hear even if it kills her.  _ She’s wrong. This is Jack’s fault. On so many levels.

“It’s just...I can’t…”

“Riles, you don’t owe me an explanation.” The very least he can do is not prod whatever is clearly a sore place. But she doesn’t really seem to hear him. She might be past that now. 

"Elwood hit my mom. A lot. And sometimes he hit me too." She's breathing hard, like she's been running for miles. She's probably skating on the edge of panic.

Jack can't tell whether the best thing to do is try to reassure her or to let her be and ride it out. If the situation was different he'd have put a hand on her shoulder to try and ground her, but that might be the worst thing he could possibly do.

It’s not like he didn’t know what Riley’s childhood must have been like. He’s seen her micro-reactions to raised hands and loud voices. They’ve been carefully schooled down to almost nothing over the years, it’s not fresh trauma, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t affect her. Still, there’s knowing, and then there’s  _ knowing. _

"I told myself I was never going to be like him. That I would never let anger make me violent." Riley looks down at her hands like they're venomous snakes.

"You didn't, Riles. This was just playing a part." A part that she never should have been asked to play. He wonders who looked at her unredacted file and decided this was okay. 

"No. It wasn't." Riley whispers. "I let myself get angry. Really angry. At him. Because I wanted to make it believable." She sucks in a watery breath. “And I lost control. And I hurt you.” She looks up, eyes sparkling in the streetlights, the first time she’s looked at Jack properly since she stormed out of the restaurant. Jack can feel the slight burn of the tight skin on his cheek. He doesn’t bruise easily, but there is probably still a slight red mark. 

He doesn’t try and placate her. Tell her she didn’t really hurt him. That will only make things worse.

“No one is gonna make you do this again. If they do, I’ll quit.” 

Riley blinks. 

“Look, Grant was out of line on this one. Webber will understand. And if she doesn’t, that’s her problem. Not yours. No one should have asked you to do this in the first place. And I shouldn’t have pushed.” 

“I just...I thought I should be able to handle whatever. We don’t get to pick our ops.”

“Yeah, but we file trauma information notices.” Jack glances at her. “Those aren’t just a one-way ticket to riding a desk. Those help determine who gets tapped for what op. I guess no one bothered to tell you that.”

“I filled one out. But their categories were...kind of vague. And I didn’t have a problem with mid-op violence in and of itself.” Jack figures she deliberately tried to make herself as available and useful as possible. If there wasn’t a blinking neon sign that said ‘check this box if you are a survivor of child abuse’, she didn’t bother to say anything at all. 

“Yeah, paperwork here sucks,” Jack commiserates, and Riley barks out a short, humorless laugh. “But seriously. When we get back and Matty gets back, you should tell her. She’ll make sure your file is properly labeled and tagged. And then you won’t even get asked to do these kind of undercovers.” He looks over at her. “You ready to go in for the debrief?”

“Not yet.” Riley picks at a loose string on her jeans. “But we don’t have a choice, do we?”

“Grant’s already got it in for me. He can add being unforgivably late to my offenses.” Jack glances at Riley. “Where you wanna go?”

“We never did get to eat. I’m still kind of hungry.” Her voice is still subdued, but it’s more like the Riley he knows. 

“There’s a diner that serves all night breakfast a couple blocks over.” Jack starts the car and pulls out. They’re not okay. They won’t be okay for a while, after this. But they’ll get there. Together. 


End file.
